How to Make a Patchwork Adjustable Camera Strap

I have a vintage tin cracker box on my dresser. The box has traveled with me for over 20 years to the nearly 20 different places I’ve lived. No one aside from me has ever opened the box or seen the contents.

The first thing I put in the box was a ticket stub from the Michael Jackson concert my dad took me to in 7^th grade. Now, nearly two decades later the box is stuffed to the brim with other tiny tokens that remind me of places I went, people I met and things I did. Aside from that concert ticket stub, some of the things in the box are the first friendship bracelet anyone gave me, the first love letter that my first boyfriend sent me, post it notes that my mom would leave on my bathroom mirror reminding me to do my chores and that she loved me, the first handmade thing I ever purchased which was a pair of earrings made from pressed flowers, countless ticket stubs from planes, trains and buses, a copy of the receipt from the first time I ever sold a piece of art that I’d made, cocktail napkins with blurry poems written late at night in dark dive bars, a few photographs and a lot of other things that I couldn’t bear to let go.

Last year I got married and made all of my wedding decorations. After the wedding I kept the fabric scraps from the garlands, table runners and embroidery hoop fabric ‘chandeliers’ I’d made. While I was cleaning out my studio the other day I found all of those wedding fabric scraps and snipped a tiny piece off one of them to add to my cracker box ‘time capsule’. There were a lot of scraps and I started thinking about ways to use them. I thought about the DIY camera strap round-up post I did a few months ago and got inspired to finally create my own strap using the fabric scraps from my wedding.

Since the scraps were small I had to sew them together and ended up creating a ‘patchwork scarf’, then I added the hardware and in less than an hour my strap was done. I love my cracker tin full of keepsakes but I rarely look at everything inside it. The camera strap is awesome because every time I use my camera I’m reminded of my wedding day and the loveliness of being surrounded by friends and family. If you have special fabric scraps that you’ve been holding onto, this is the perfect way to turn them into something functional.

Want to make your own patchwork adjustable camera strap? Check out the full tutorial on Bernina’s We All Sew blog.